There is no foot in your mouth at all! You had nothing to apologize for or feel at all embarrassed about. Megan asked a question and you gave her a straightforward answer. If it was a subject she wanted to avoid, she didn't need to bring it up or ask you questions about it. You can respect her and her beliefs without dancing around the issue or contorting yourself around the honest truth. Not great dinner table conversation, but it's not rude to Megan specifically. I don't even think she should have accepted your apology, so much as she should have assured you no apology was necessary.

I have to admit, it wouldn't occur to me at all to mention to a vegetarian or vegan guest that it's either possible or certain that the produce I'm serving were grown with bone or blood meal. Is that something I should be mentioning to guests? Or is it just so common that it should be assumed to be the case?

I agree, Megan's comment "Don't you know how cruelty those animals are killed?" is actually quite rude. Partiuclary to someone who does their own animal husbandry.

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My cousin's memoir of love and loneliness while raising a child with multiple disabilities will be out on Amazon soon! Know the Night, by Maria Mutch, has been called "full of hope, light, and companionship for surviving the small hours of the night."

You were both joking, which I think is fine. My problem would have been with both of you having that particular conversation while I was eating.

I thought it was common knowledge that animal byproducts are used as fertilizer - bone meal adds calcium and other minerals, for example. When I was a kid we'd fertilize tomatoes with fish guts/heads - resulting in "cherry" tomatoes that people took for runty normal ones.

I can't imagine "warning" a vegetarian that their produce might have been fertilized by animals, simply becasue there's no way of knowing. Even organic veggies can be fertilized with organic bone meal.

I agree, Megan's comment "Don't you know how cruelty those animals are killed?" is actually quite rude. Partiuclary to someone who does their own animal husbandry.

POD. Even if she was joking I wouldn't appreciate a comment like this. It reminds me of one of the microwaves at my DF's school that had a sign on it saying "Please do not microwave dead animal carcasses" with a smiley underneath it. Its just not funny to pass judgement on others for their eating habits.

If she didn't stop you when you were talking about gutting animals, why would you think she'd be offended that you answered her question about what happens to the offal?

The fact that animal remains were used as fertilizer doesn't somehow make the vegetables less vegetarian. It's fairly common knowledge that crops are fertilized with animal poop, and no one would claim that that means eating veggies = eating excrement.

Don't be embarrassed. It's not like you handed her a carrot dripping in sheep's blood!

I thought it was common knowledge that animal byproducts are used as fertilizer - bone meal adds calcium and other minerals, for example.

I thought so, too. It wouldn't ever occur to me that someone isn't already aware of this. How do people think they get fertilized?!

Petroleum, most likely. A lot of commercial fertilizers are either coal or oil derivitives, or are chemical compounds produced using fossil fuel energy. When the price of oil goes up, so does the price of fertilizer. Organic gardening, on the other hand, uses a lot of animal by-products like guano, feather meal and shrimp shell meal. You can buy organic vegan fertilizers, but you have to search for them, and they cost about a third more.

The biggest faux pas is getting into too much detail about blood and guts while people are eating. Even though the OP's vegetarian friend asked, the other people at the table might not have been too thrilled to hear about sheep guts while eating.

Thanks for your assurances, everyone.I'm pretty sure that Megan is of the 'fertilizer comes in a bag' background, because the expression on her face when I told her that vegetables tend to be fertilized with blood and bone was pretty shocked and dumbfounded. (If it makes any difference, we live in a capital city and she comes from a very city-orientated family) She's such a nice lady, I feel guilty for staining her rose-tinted glasses.

Personally, I didn't see Megan as being rude for her own comment - though perhaps its because I know the audience. Everyone there is good about things to that nature, so no one was going to take the joke as anything but a joke.I'll try to remember not to use my 'I assure you, it was killed very humanely - after all, I killed it myself' response at the dinner table anymore though.

I'm not a vegetarian, but I tend to be sensitive about animal suffering the way many vegetarians are. What you said wouldn't bother me at all. After all, the animals are already dead, and I actually feel better knowing that all or most parts of the animals are used for something.